Installing Fedora Core 3, Part 6

Printing

I finally not only got the printer to work for my linux computer, but also convinced it to serve the printer for our windows laptops.

I use cups, with a fairly normal configuration, but I made sure to Deny From None, and Allow From All. (I have an intranet behind a firewall so this is ok.)

I made sure to also disable my iptables firewall on my linux machine, also ok because I’m behind another firewall. You can keep iptables if you want, but you need to unblock port 631 for trusted computers.

I tried to use samba for a while, but found it excruciatingly painful. My windows machines could print to the printer via samba – sort of. There seemed to be a lot of miscommunication and freeze-ups on the WinXP side of things.

In the end, the best way to have the windows computers connect turned out to be as an “Internet Printer” in Windows terms. Or using cups IPP in linux terms. See this tutorial for an excellent explanation. The key for me was to discover the proper way to word the url. For a linux IP address of, for example, 192.168.1.2, and a printer named ‘myprinter’:

http://192.168.1.2:631/printers/myprinter

This form uses port 631, which is the where cups listens for IPP. The subdirectory and printer name were what I didn’t realize I had to add before.

On the windows machine, I went to “Add a Printer”, checked “Add a network printer”, checked “Connect to a printer on the Internet or on a home or office network”, and then entered in the blank the URL above. I then hit next, and when it asked for a driver, I gave it the native driver for my printer that I downloaded off the internet into a directory, using “Have Disk…”

The page I linked to above says that for Fedora you need to add configuration to cups to make it print a raw stream from the windows machines. On my more recent Fedora 3, I found it worked right off the bat with no extra configuration.